This week I was pleased to find that the closest grocery to my house sells this sort of thing:
There was a cheap bag of frozen beef dumplings and dipping sauce, so no longer would I have to limit myself to the paltry handful of dumplings in your average appetizer plate:
The best find was the tube of "Korean Brand Mini Chubb Cured Meat Product."
It tastes much like off-brand luncheon meat. Only with Korean spices. And kinda spongey. Look out SPAM, you have some competition in the weird nationalistic processed animal meat department.
I ate it with tortillas and some of the wasabi mayonnaise.
The wasabi mayo tasted like a creamy green dominatrix kicking me in the lungs with her stiletto heals. And then in the sinuses. And then in the lungs again.
I will never use another condiment again.
During an early morning search for a hangover cure, I indulged in the Texas kolache.
My relatives who are Czech know of kolaches from the home country, but the Texas version is unrecognizable to them. Basically it’s a mediocre dinner roll wrapped around some sausage or jelly.
A particularly Austin innovation has hybridized the breakfast taco with the kolache. You can now buy kolaches stuffed with scrambled eggs and chorizo.
Another visit to the local roach coach provided me with this lovely combination of a carne guisada taco (which just means stew meat as far as I can tell) and a chicharron taco (on the left) which means marinated pig skin:
All this for about $2.75. The chicharron was a little rubbery to the teeth, but it quickly dissolved into fatty goodness on the tongue.
At the Indian grocery I had bought a pack of instant noodles. It’s obviously ramen noodles, but these are made of lentils and the plentiful spice packets are a highly nuanced blend of Indian spices.
Delicious, but suspiciously healthy-tasting.
And when I want to get myself tweaked for doing work, there’s always the mate ("Too Much Coffee Man Magazine" says: "It’s like getting hit in the face with a bag of wet hay"). I’ve taken to drinking most of my beverages with jaggary these days.
Jaggary is an Indian sugar source, lightly processed, with a consistency halfway between honey and brown sugar. It has a musky, fermented odor, and when added to a beverage, imparts an extra depth of flavor, much like the difference one finds between whisky and scotch.
Somebody should remind me to make some wine from this stuff. You can buy it by the sackful.
